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brifs.co Proposal | NEM Community Fund (NCF) | 1 of 3
Here’s how to vote in 3 steps:
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Review our proposal below
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Sign into your NEM NanoWallet - OR download it here, create a new “simple wallet” & sign in
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In the NEM NanoWallet go to -> Send &
A) To vote YES send 0 XEM to NC2NPW-ZBIHPA-E2GCLD-HWZ3JE-K7XE4B-4JWZ4N-NV7K
B) To vote NO send 0 XEM to NAAG4J-KTN7AW-IRPTSS-VJAXL3-XQVYPT-TJYMUI-HGRN
Here’s why everyone should vote YES:
brifs.co is a perfect fit for the NEM Community Fund and plans on returning the funding several times over to the NEM Community. Here are the 3 main ways we intend to do this:
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Our gift card marketplace anticipates processing 10’s of thousand of transactions on the NEM blockchain on a daily basis within the next 5 years.
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All of those transactions will be gift card sales and all of those gift cards will have “Proudly built on the NEM blockchain” prominently displayed giving massive exposure to NEM among 100’s of thousands, if not millions of US consumers (see image below).
- 6% of the total supply of our mosaics brifs:brif will be given the NEM community and the NEM Foundation. Our success is NEM’s success.
But wait there’s more…
There are dozens of other smaller and less direct ways we are going to try to make the NCF’s investment in our project the best use of funds; helping other NEM projects, spreading the word about NEM to Venture Capitalists and the broader blockchain community, participating in events, to name a few. We encourage you to ask literally any NEMber or NF member that has interacted with us about what their experience has been like and what they think of our project.
Here’s are links to the Full Proposal:
Russian: bit.ly/Rossiya
Ukrainian: brifs.co/s/brifsco-NCF-12-8bsc.pdf
French: brifs.co/s/brifsco-Resume-du-projet.pdf
This is our one page summary:
English: brifs.co/s/brifs.co-1-Page-Summary
Japanese: bit.ly/summary_japan
Russian: bit.ly/ru-%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%B7%D1%8E%D0%BC%D0%B5
French: brifs.co/s/brifsco-Resume-du-projet.pdf
And here are several interviews with brifs.co’s founder Charlie Muir:
NEM with Tony: youtu.be/eEjscbJooBA
The CryptoClass: youtu.be/VailsY0tmjg
LatiNEM: youtube.com/watch?v=gUf8vErlLfY
And keep an eye out for the next episode of Inside NEM: bit.ly/Inside_NEM
Thank you for voting & wish us luck!
Proposal Abstract
brifs.co is using NEM’s blockchain to unlock the $160 billion gift card market by building a trustless and decentralised peer-to-peer marketplace for unwanted gift cards. Our aim is to reduce the estimated $24 - $32 billion annual economic loss caused by the current status quo of low liquidity and poor fungibility.1 2
Note to the Reader
After speaking with scores of people about brifs.co, we’ve found that many of the aspects which drive our proposal are nuanced and somewhat abstract. The foundation of the problem we are solving is built upon economic theory and our business strategy is based on an unstructured body of thought which is common to operators and investors within the startup space, but which is foreign outside of that sphere.
Because we want to make our mission available to the widest possible audience, we’ve thoroughly broken down the problem we’re solving, how we plan on solving it, and why that plan has strong potential to be a success; a success not just for brifs.co, but for the broader NEM community as well.
In order to make this material more easily digestible, we’ve split out NEM Community Fund proposal into 3 separate posts to the NEM forum. To help make our proposal more easily navigable, we’ve included a linked table of contents below as well. We hope you enjoy reading our work and should you have any questions, please comment below or join brifs.co on Telegram. Cheers!
Table of Contents
brifs.co Proposal | NCF | 1 of 3
- Executive Summary
- The Task at Hand
- brifs.co Live Alpha with Revenue
- Integrated Brands
- What’s the Problem with Gift Cards?
- Billions in Economic Loss
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Works Cited
brifs.co Proposal | NCF | 2 of 3
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How brifs.co Solves the Problem
- The Technical Solution | NEM Blockchain — BaaS
- The Economic Solution | Business Model & Strategy
- 0% Commission
- Network effects
- Expanding the Pie
- BRIF Token
- 0% Commission is a Strategy
- 10X Better
- Critical Mass Builds a Moat
- brifs.co Business Model
- Retail Retargeting
- Targeted In-App Ads
- Brand Promotions
- Monetization Summary
- The User Acquisition & Retention Solution |Usability
brifs.co Proposal | NCF | 3 of 3
- Company Roadmap
- Our Team
- Community Fund DAO Milestones
- brifs.co’s Commitment to Adding Value to the NEM Community
Executive Summary
“Is every asset in the world destined to become liquid on the blockchain? The answer is ‘yes’. That is the next revolution.” — William Mougayar 3
William Mougayar
Blockchain Thought-Leader
The brifs.co team is on a mission to create mass adoption of the NEM blockchain in the US, by way of the BRIF mosaic. We’re carrying out this mission by providing US consumers with a frictionless way to save money on nearly all of their retail purchases.
From lettuce to laptops and from t-shirts to air travel, brifs.co saves people money by creating a platform where they can buy and sell their unneeded gift cards. Sellers can put their idle gift cards to better use and buyers save a bit of money when they buy discounted gift cards securely using BRIF mosaics.
We’re building brifs.co to be natural and intuitive for average shoppers by providing a user experience just like the ones that they are used to already for their online shopping. For many, if not most of these shoppers, the NEM blockchain will be their first experience with crypto.
As usage of the brifs.co platform grows, so does the usage and awareness of XEM/NEM. For the NEM Community, buyers, and sellers it’s a ‘win’, ‘win’, ‘win’!
We are seeking $500K USD or roughly 2.0M XEM at the time of writing from the Community Fund DAO to help facilitate bringing this project into fruition, which will help reduce the vast economic waste within the current gift card market’s existing status quo.
The Task at Hand
Distributed ledgers in conjunction with smart contracts allow for unprecedented liquidity among a myriad of assets. This is due to the immutable nature of data on blockchains and trustlessness enabled by smart contracts in creating systems of record for ownership rights management, facilitation of clearing & settlement, as well as dispute resolution. These advances minimize transaction costs in marketplaces and exchanges by reducing or eliminating the need for a centralized mediating authority and expensive payment processing fees.
Additionally, tokenization has created a vehicle with which organizations can build the infrastructure needed to develop viable asset exchanges, while not requiring transactional value extraction (which traditionally took the form of platform commissions).
The brifs.co mission is to utilize NEM’s multisig feature to verify gift card funds, and create an underlying system of record. We’ll use NEM’s Namespace and Mosaic to tokenize the gift card values, record & manage ownership rights, while also facilitating clearing & settlement; making gift cards significantly more fungible. With that infrastructure in place, the brifs.co team is creating a vibrant marketplace where consumers can buy and sell their unwanted gift cards, without paying commission or payment processing fees.
0% commission and 0% fees make gift cards perfectly liquid. The difference (spread) between a gift card’s balance and the market price for a particular brand’s card would be determined by demand alone, without any intermediary value extraction. Gift cards would no longer be locked up by gift card issuers, who view unspent balances as free money. Nor would they be held hostage by incumbent secondary gift card marketplaces, which act as rent-seeking middlemen, taking as much as 15% of the seller’s gross.
We believe that gift cards belong to you, the consumer. Gift cards simply do not belong to the store that issued them and they are not the property of the secondary marketplaces, which demand their double-digit cut of all peer-to-peer sales. We believe gift cards should be as good or better than cash and we are not going to rest until that vision becomes a reality.
brifs.co Live Alpha with Revenue
The team has invested our own capital in developing our MVP (minimum viable product), in its thorough research and development, and an aggressive go to market strategy. One of the most universally important milestones in any tech company is launching an MVP to show proof of concept.
The question we attempted to answer with our MVP was “Can we source gift cards at discounted prices, at scale; and if so, will people buy them?” The answers we found were: yes, yes, and yes.
The brifs.co team has been able to build a site where users can find some of the best gift card deals anywhere on the web. In doing so we have had thousands of people from all over the globe visit our website, and make purchases; all without spending any money on marketing.
Users found us in search results which drove a lot of free traffic to our site. So much so that we had to ask them to stop buying from us in a pop-up message (see image below).
The issue is that orders became a distraction from all of the other things that our small team had to focus on. After all, we’re not building a typical tech startup. We’re building a 0% commission business on the blockchain. We see ourselves as pioneers in tokenized peer-to-peer marketplaces.
The whole point of p2p marketplaces in the new economy is to cut out the middlemen, who remove value from the system by making money off of their users’ transactions.
In the earliest stages of developing brifs.co, we realized that building a customer base meant building a customer support and order fulfillment team. The numbers on that just don’t pencil out without having a firm roadmap for integrating the blockchain to vastly reduce transaction costs.
So we rolled up our sleeves and doubled down on defining the problem, through R&D, while building our catalog of supported gift card brands. We now support over 130 brands including some of the world’s most recognizable companies, with more being added all the time.
Integrated Brands
brifs.co has been able to integrate with many of the largest brands in the US and abroad, and we’re adding more brand integrations almost daily. Below is an image of just some of the gift card brands we are fully live to buy and sell on brifs.co
What’s the Problem with Gift Cards?
“I could spend $50 and buy something that would be worth nothing to you.” — Prof. Joel Waldfogel 4
Joel Waldfogel
Author & Econ. Professor
Top industry analysts, CEB (now Gartner) estimate that gift card sales will reach $160 billion annually in the US alone in 2018.1
Well known economist, Joel Waldfogel estimates that gift giving destroys economic value of roughly 15% - 30% of the amount spent.5 This is due in large part to people giving gifts that recipients do not value as much as the gift’s cash equivalent.
This phenomenon is known as ‘welfare loss’ or ‘deadweight loss’ in economics.
For example, have you ever gotten a fruit basket as a gift? Harry & David is a popular gift basket company famous for their delicious pears. Harry & David gift boxes can cost several hundred dollars, but one of their least expensive gift boxes is called the Merry Mix-Up® Gift Box.6
The Merry Mix-Up® Gift Box includes 6 Royal Riviera® Pears (2 lb 13 oz Approx.), Sharp white cheddar cheese (4 oz), and Mixed nuts [cashews, almonds, walnuts, pecans] (4 oz) and costs over $40 with delivery.6 Okay, so they are great pears, cheese, and nuts, but are they worth $40 to you? Maybe they are, but maybe to some people, they don’t like pears, are lactose intolerant, and have a tree nut allergy.
To those people this gift is worth $0 (or less). The deadweight loss, relative to the cash equivalent, in that case is 100%.
That gift just caused $40 to evaporate from the economy in the form of welfare loss, and this economic principle extends to gift cards as well.
Billions in Economic Loss
“gift cards have a welfare loss that is comparable — although perhaps not worse — than physical presents.” — Prof. Jennifer Pate 7
Jennifer Pate
Economics Professor
Expanding on Waldfogel’s idea of economic destruction and applying it to gift cards, economics professor Jennifer Pate estimates that gift cards result in roughly 15% - 20% of welfare loss. Using the CEB (now Gartner) estimates of 2018 gift card sales running $160 Billion, then the deadweight loss of gift cards is between $24 and $32 Billion.7
To put it into perspective, that means gift cards destroy more than the entire Transportation Infrastructure Industry ($20.93B), which includes all of the owners and operators of airports, roads, tunnels, rail tracks, and marine ports, as well as the companies providing related services.8
Stay Up to Date
- Join brifs.co on Telegram
- Read our 1-Page Summary &/or our Whitepaper
- Follow our blog on Medium
- Visit us on the web: brifs.co
- Email: hello {@} brifs {dot} co
- Follow our Twitter: @brifsdotco
Continue to brifs.co Proposal | NCF | 2 of 3
Works Cited
- CEB (now Gartner), 2015 Gift Card Sales To Reach New Peak Of $130 Billion, 2015-12-08
- American Economic Association, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Jennifer Pate Offenberg, Markets: Gift Cards, 2007-04-01
- Conference: Cryptospace Moscow, WIlliam Mougayar, Business on Blockchain, 2017-12-27
- PBS, NewsHour, Making Sen$e, Paul Solman and Joel Waldfogel, The economics of wasteful spending: The deadweight loss of Christmas, 2013-12-23
- The American Economic Review, Vol. 83, No. 5, Joel Waldfogel, The Deadweight Loss of Christmas, December 1993
- Harry & David, Merry Mix-Up® Gift Box
- American Economic Association, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Jennifer Pate Offenberg, Markets: Gift Cards, 2007-04-01
- Fidelity Investments (FMR LLC.), Research, Markets & Sectors, Transportation Infrastructure